News & Views

August 2007 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “In the June/July issue of CAmagazine, we looked at swimlane flowcharting as a tool to document business process. But even though swimlanes bring clarity and consensus to a process, they don’t show controls or control weaknesses. So if business process improvement is the objective, you need a control matrix.

A control matrix can be used to document controls and control weaknesses, which are all referenced on the swimlane. The matrix should include controls over validity, accuracy and completeness of transaction data entry. As well, there should be controls over accuracy and completeness when master files are updated through transactions. These controls need to be considered for every transaction in the scope of the review. Security of resources (cash, inventory, etc.) should also be evaluated.

If improvement is your goal, you must also consider efficiency and effectiveness. These are often ignored by the auditors, which is unfortunate. Auditors could add value in those areas. Efficiency means maximizing the work that gets done using the fewest resources. Any duplication of work or rekeying of information should be easy to catch.

Effectiveness means the business process delivers value according to the organization’s critical success factors. CSFs are defined as activities that must be done well for the organization to be successful. A single department may be efficient and effective on its own, but this may be at the expense of the organization as a whole.

May 24, 2007 from ComputerWorld – “Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon’s TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it’s very difficult to declare these skills — or any computer skill, really — dead.

In fact, the harder you try to declare a technology dead, it seems, the more you turn up evidence of its continuing existence. Nevertheless, after speaking with several industry stalwarts, we’ve compiled a list of skills and technologies that, while not dead, can perhaps be said to be in the process of dying. Or as Stewart Padveen, Internet entrepreneur and currently founder of AdPickles Inc., says, “Obsolescence is a relative — not absolute — term in the world of technology.”

180 View – If your company is using any of the technologies listed (Cobol, Nonrelational DBMS, Non-IP networks…), then you might want to make a change. It’s not just because these technologies are fading, it’s because the people that support them are retiring making it all that more difficult to support. We predict a significant increase in new systems when the baby boomers retire.

July 25, 2007 from IT Business Edge – “A report from AMR Research indicates that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance spending will reach $32 billion next year — the majority of which is allocated to outside consultants. AMR vice president John Hagerty notes, “If there’s a clear winner here, it’s the auditors themselves.”

And though one might think that competition between firms for big Sarbox audit contracts would be fierce, Sarbanes-Oxley prevents audit firms from performing internal compliance consulting for the companies they audit. As such, those companies often hire one firm for consulting and another to do the audit.”

180 View – This is not what’s happening in Canada where the external auditor is not prevented from reviewing controls based on Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) guidelines.

August 1, 2007 from CFO Magazine – “Here at CFO, we get a lot of information from technology vendors offering products that promise to do everything from scrubbing your numbers to cleaning your computer screen. We dutifully evaluate these offerings so you don’t have to. Lo and behold, some actually merit a little ink.

To winnow down our list, we summarily dismissed any product described by a vendor as “seamless,” “mission critical,” or “way cool.” Even then, we also had to omit several excellent products for space reasons. For example, we recently visited the latest version of Teliris’s VirtuaLive, a telepresence conference room replete with high-definition screens and integrated audio, and it’s a knockout. Managers at any multinational business looking to cut down on travel expenses should seriously consider it. Those who have no choice but to hit the road on a regular basis will do well to look at Siber Systems’s RoboForm2Go. This souped up thumbdrive offers road warriors a painless — and secure — way to take their passwords with them. On the road or at home, these five picks merit a closer look.

180 View – We don’t know enough about any of the products mentioned in the article to comment. If you have recently read a review of a “hot” product, please let us know so that we can spread the word.

August 17, 2007 from IT Business Edge – “Companies have fallen into the trap of having thought that they have bought a solution, whereas what has really happened is that they have bought some technology. This technology may make things work faster – but if the over-riding CRM processes are bad, all you will do is hack off customers more quickly than you were doing before – and possibly more of them.”

180 View – The same can be said for any system. Implementing a new system is the best opportunity you will ever have to improve business process.

July 1, 2007 from CFO Magazine – “Maybe it’s globalization. As U.S. companies source more goods from the far corners of the world, it makes sense that they would stock more inventory as a guard against potential breakdowns in their supply chains. Or maybe it’s economic priorities. With corporate coffers bulging like overloaded transpacific freighters, finance executives could be taking their eye off second-tier metrics like inventory, payables, and receivables. Whatever the explanation, 2006 marked the first time in five years that the 1,000 largest publicly traded companies in the United States (excluding automakers) failed to decrease the amount of cash they had tied up in working capital relative to sales.”

180 View – Check this article out for an explanation of working capital problems, metric definitions as well as actual metrics across industries. One of our methodologies for any system upgrade or replacement is to link key metrics with critical success factors. It would also be useful to compare your metrics to your industry. Unfortunately, the metrics provided are based on large public companies. However it’s not clear to us whether the metrics of smaller companies will vary significantly. On the one hand, larger companies can afford more sophisticated technology. On the other hand smaller companies can be more nimble.

August 1, 2007 from a subscriber of 180 Systems’ News and Views – “Wi-Max is alive and well in Canada. Rogers calls it their portable internet. Bell calls it their wi max. I have it at my cottage now (Muskoka).

It is slower than cable in the city, but it is 25 – 35 times faster than dial up. I regularly get download speeds of 1.7MB and upload of 256KB. For reference, cable in the city is about 7MB download and 512KB upload. Not bad for coming in off of the cell towers. And, it has been 100% reliable for the last 7 weeks since I installed it.”

180 View – One of our subscribers sent this information to us after reading the artice entitled “The wide world of Wi-Max” in last month’s issue.

August 22, 2007 from PC World – “Google Inc. may just be the center of the universe now: A new add-on for its Earth satellite program, called Sky, lets users explore space and see photos of the precise star formation overhead based on their locale.”

180 View – We recommend extreme caution in looking skyward especially if you have a lot of work to do.

August 20, 2007 from Harvard Business Review and included in SAP’s newsletter – “Our findings took us quite by surprise. Most of the management tools and techniques we studied had no direct causal relationship to superior business performance. What does matter, it turns out, is having a strong grasp of the business basics. Without exception, companies that outperformed their industry peers excelled at what we call the four primary management practices—strategy, execution, culture, and structure. And they supplemented their great skill in those areas with a mastery of any two out of four secondary management practices—talent, innovation, leadership, and mergers and partnerships. We learned, for example, that it doesn’t really matter if you implement ERP software or a CRM system; it matters very much, though, that whatever technology you choose to implement you execute it flawlessly.

180 View – Although SAP’s newsletter showed this article under the heading “More Recent Headlines”, it was actually published in July 2003. Nevertheless the article is a good one and is not available from Harvard Business Review without a premium subscription. So check it out if you’re interested in management practices such as:

• Build a strategy around a clear value proposition for the customer.
• Develop strategy from the outside in, based on what your customers, partners, and investors have to say—and how they behave—not on gut feel or instinct.
• Continually fine-tune your strategy based on changes in the marketplace— for example, a new technology, a social trend, a government regulation, or a competitor’s breakaway product.
• Clearly communicate your strategy within the organization and to customers and other external stakeholders.
• Keep focused.
• Grow your core business, and beware the unfamiliar.

July 10, 2007 from Harvard Business School – “The flood of writing about leadership continues. It reflects our fascination with what many believe to be the most important influence on organizational performance. In a thought-provoking book published last year, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton suggest that the overriding impact of leadership on performance is a myth, or at least only a half-truth. 30 years ago, in reviewing research on leadership, Pfeffer concluded at that time that actions of leaders most often explain no more than 10 percent of performance…”

180 View (written by Lawrence Young) – As Charles Dickens wrote in 1859 in his acclaimed work ‘The Tale of Two Cities’: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.

Perhaps the same can be said nearly 150 years later. Our world today is mired with political, social and economic volatility. The ‘haves’ are a tiny minority amongst the ‘have nots’. The newspapers are awash with story after story telling us ‘regular folk’ that our leaders seem more driven by their personal agendas than their mandates and fiduciary duties as leaders.
We count on our leaders, be they politicians, businesspeople, or those who guide non-profit organizations, to “make things happen”. But alas, there are three types of leaders in this world-those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who say “what happened?”

The issue of leadership has been the subject of intense study since the earliest days of recorded civilization. Modern day research on organizational performance, as evidenced by Jim Collins’ bestseller ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t’, have usually suggested that leadership is omnipotent insofar as corporate results are concerned.

However, other studies disagree on the overall affect of leaders on organizational performance. For example in their 2006 book ‘Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management’, authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton suggest that “the overriding impact of leadership on performance is a myth, or at least only a half-truth. Thirty years ago, in reviewing research on leadership, Pfeffer concluded at that time that actions of leaders most often explain no more than 10 percent of performance. Such things as a company’s operating environment, the economy in general, or its long-run success or failure account for more of its current performance.”

Harvard Business School Professor James Heskett invited commentary on this thought-provoking topic that has far-reaching consequences, and this article contains his original article together with 127 comments that he received from readers with various backgrounds and experiences.

In short, the comments indicate that we sorely need leaders that are visionary, creative, courageous, intelligent, persistent, charismatic, and most of all, passionately committed with unfaltering integrity to placing the needs of those they serve ahead of their own personal needs and wants.

History has proven that our greatest leaders shared a common strength and purpose – the ability to envision a radically different future from the condition of life during their lifetime. They were also relentlessly persistent notwithstanding that they understood that they would not see the full results of their efforts during their lifetime. As well, they had the personal courage to confront both internal and external threats, with vision beyond the conventional wisdom of their day. We must therefore look to our past great leaders as role models in order to seek out or become the great leaders of tomorrow.